Zohra Sehgal with her great granddaughter Madhyama at her home in Delhi on Friday. Picture by Rajesh Kumar

New Delhi, Oct. 14: Zohra Sehgal has been waiting for us, sitting by the second-floor window, dressed in white, her back straight and hair tied up in a severe bun, the familiar deep voice unwavering at 99 years.

But before the conversation starts, she has a query: is the light good enough for a photograph? “I am proud and vain,” declares the dancer-actor.

As if on cue, she strikes a pose and teases the camera, holding her tongue out and winking. You wouldn’t guess that the last time she stepped out of home was in July last year, for the launch of her book, Close-Up.

But you wouldn’t go out much, either, if three persons were needed to carry you downstairs in a plastic chair. Someone with a replaced knee and six months short of her centenary isn’t expected to climb up and down 50 steps.

Which is why she and daughter Kiran Sehgal, a 67-year-old Odissi dancer, want to shift from their second-floor flat in south Delhi’s Mandakini Enclave, and have written to the culture ministry seeking government accommodation.

The government is yet to take a call but filmmaker and Rajya Sabha MP Shyam Benegal, who wrote a forwarding message for the September 27 letter, has no doubt which way it ought to decide.

“In the few years she has left, she must get a place where she can be comfortable. She is no longer at an age when she can earn; she is not necessarily among people who have made money,” Benegal told The Telegraph.

“She has been applauded and awarded by India for her contribution. And what is important is that she still is mentally very active, her eyes still twinkle with wonder and the mischievous smile is still intact.”

Her last on-stage performance was when she was 97 — on August 14, 2009, in Hyderabad. Her first had been on August 8, 1935. In the 74 years in between, she has been a dancer, choreographer and actor, renowned for her recitals of Urdu poetry and her wit.

“She has been cooped up in her room for the past two years. At least, if we have a ground-floor house, she can slowly take a walk around the garden,” Kiran says in their Delhi Development Authority-built house where they live with Kiran’s granddaughter.

“I can’t beg or borrow; they should give us the house. On our credit (side), I am a Padma Shri and my mother is a Padma Vibhushan.”

The setting in the room is austere: a creaseless white sheet stretched over the bed, a small writing table. “People expect her to jump out of bed and crack a joke, but only we can see how she suffers,” Kiran says.

But she adds almost defiantly: “But she loves an audience. After all, she is a performing artiste.”

She talks about her mother’s knee replacement surgery and her fight against a leg-bone cancer. “Ma always jokes that she is the second-richest person after (steel tycoon) Laxmi Mittal, since she has so much steel in her body.”

Zohra may be hard of hearing but she is sure of her words. “Do you know I am close to 100; aren’t you scared of me? I’ll eat you up,” she says before beginning to recount stories from her past.

She talks about her birthplace Rampur in Uttar Pradesh, her trip to Kerala, her favourite restaurants in Delhi, her outings at the India International Centre, a favourite haunt of Delhi’s intelligentsia.

“At the IIC, they serve Rampuri chicken, my Rampur,” she declares.

But bring up the subject of government accommodation and her mood shifts. She does not expect the government to respond.

“Kaun dega (who’ll give it)? If you were a minister, probably you could have given me one,” she says.

Suddenly, she surprises everyone by announcing she doesn’t want to live in a ground-floor flat, after all.

“I prefer to live on the top floor always, the ground floor gets dust. I still go up and down six steps each day,” she says, chin up in the air.

Kiran shakes her head in disbelief. “She doesn’t understand that the first-floor cannot merely be six steps above,” she says, adding how her mother needs to be carried out in a chair.

But being Zohra’s friend or family has always meant being just a step away from that unexpected and potentially embarrassing comment.

Zohra herself brings up the magazine interview she gave a long time ago when her brother-in-law was a CPM member of the Rajya Sabha and her sister an active party member.

“The interviewer asked me about my views on the USSR. I said, ‘I think that the country brags too much and that cannot be a good thing’,” she reminisces.

Then abruptly, she ends the conversation. “Ab tum log jaaoge nahi kya (won’t you people leave)?” she says with the endearing frankness of a 99-year-old.